For the past several months we have been gathering extensive feedback from users regarding their Teams experience, and we are using that feedback as guidance to continuously improve the Teams platform and admin capabilities. For our customers and partners, the Teams platform is giving organizations the ability to customize and extend their experience with developer tools, third-party integrations, and more, unleashing the value of Microsoft Teams. For admins, core to delivering a great experience in Teams for your organization is better governance, and today we are excited to announce that the following capabilities that we announced at Microsoft Ignite 2018 are now available to you:

New Microsoft Teams Administrator Roles

In many organizations, there is an entire team that comes together to enable and support users as they collaborate within Teams. Members of this team perform different roles and require different types of information and tools. The new Microsoft Teams admin roles allows you provide members of your admin team the access they need to be effective at their job.

We are introducing four Team admin roles:

Teams Service Administrator: The overall Teams workload admin, whocan also manage and create O365 Groups. This role has access to all the controls available in the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business admin center and their corresponding PowerShell equivalents. For example, this role can manage all meetings, voice, messaging, and org-wide settings.

Teams Communication Administrator: This role can manage meetings and calling functionality in Microsoft Teams. For example. this includeschanges to conference bridges and phone number assignments.

Teams Communications Support Engineering: Users who are assigned this role have access to advanced call analytics tools. For example, they can view full call record information.

Teams Communications Support Specialist: This role has access to basic call analytics tools. For example, the can view information for the specific users being searched for.

PowerShell cmdlets are available for each role. Most of these can be found in the Skype for Business PowerShell module and some of them control share settings that are also used by Skype for Business.

Users can be assigned any of these Teams admin roles via the Azure Admin Portal. Simply find the user profile in the Azure Active Directory and click on “Directory Role” from the left navigation. Next, click “Add Role” and select the Teams admin role you want to assign. Find details about the available admin roles here.

Assign the new Microsoft Teams admin roles

Manage your teams from the Admin Center

Delivering a great experience to your users not only requires you to understand how teams are coming together and the details of each virtual workspace but being able to make changes to foster communication and collaboration.

You can now access and manage a complete list of all teams in your organization from the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Admin center (or via PowerShell). You can access this list in the admin center by selecting “Teams” in the left navigation and clicking “Manage Teams”.

This view provides Global Administrators or Teams Service Administrators access to team properties such as team name, number of users, and privacy information. Complete with search and edit capabilities, you can easily find a specific team and perform key actions like updating membership, change settings, and transfer ownership. Learn more here.

Manage your teams directly from the Admin Center

Note: It make take some time for all teams in your organization to appear initially as the backfill process is ongoing.

Automate the Teams Lifecycle

Streamlining the process of creating and customizing teams allows you to save time while enabling a familiar experience for your users when they open up Teams. With the general availability of 37 Graph APIs, you now have the ability to achieve all this, and more.

Use Microsoft Graph APIs to create a new virtual team when a new business issue arises, populate the team with the right people, and configure the team with channels and apps.

When the business issue is resolved and you no longer need the virtual team, use the Microsoft Teams API to archive or delete the team. If you know the maximum duration of the virtual team when you create it, set an Office 365 group expiration policy for the team that automatically removes the team according to the policy.

Example scenarios

Here are a few potential scenarios where you might provision groups of teams:

Airlines: provision new channels for new flight routes

Legal: create a new team or channel when a new case arises.

Educational institutions: every semester, create a new batch of teams tied to class rosters, schedules, etc.

Project management teams: every time you spin up new projects, automatically create & populate relevant teams and channels to get started more quickly and efficiently.

Sales: Have a new lead? Perfect, automatically provision a launch a new team with the key virtual team you’ll need to land the deal.

Event planning: for each new conference and event, coordinate better by leveraging templates to spin up new teams and channels for that event. This is how we planned Ignite!

You can now create familiar experiences for your people by automatically deploying relevant apps (from Microsoft and others) into Teams. List the teams in your tenant, and install apps in them. Create tabs in channels and pin your app to a tab to give users easy access to apps. Then, send messages to the channel linking back to your website."

Example scenarios

Legal: in addition to the example scenario above, you can go beyond simply provisioning the team with the right people and now also automatically deploy relevant apps into these teams thanks to partners like LawToolBox, and more!

Sales: in addition to the example scenario above, you can auto-populate relevant teams with integrations like our Dynamics CRM app.

How you can leverage the Graph APIs?

Speak to your developers or trusted partners to begin leveraging the power of Microsoft Teams and the Graph APIs, today

Check out this tutorial to see how to leverage the Graph APIs in your organization, today

Stay tuned for more announcements regarding Graph APIs for retrieving and posting messages in channels and chats.

Does the assignment of the above Role of "Teams Communication Administrator" mentioned above supersede the setting that has been applied via PowerShell in "Manage Who can create Groups" I am pleased with all of the new Admin and governance features but it seems as if it is coming after many have already used the other controls to try and manage the explosion of Teams and Office 365 Groups.

Very neat, but Team names show at random (most likely oldest to newest created) and there's no ability to sort alphabetically. Using the search works when you're looking for a specific Team, but this isn't a fix for trying to browse for one. A must have for companies with hundreds of Teams, please share with the dev team, thanks!

"You can now create familiar experiences for your people by automatically deploying relevant apps (from Microsoft and others) into Teams. List the teams in your tenant, and install apps in them. Create tabs in channels and pin your app to a tab to give users easy access to apps. Then, send messages to the channel linking back to your website."

Does the assignment of the above Role of "Teams Communication Administrator" mentioned above supersede the setting that has been applied via PowerShell in "Manage Who can create Groups" I am pleased with all of the new Admin and governance features but it seems as if it is coming after many have already used the other controls to try and manage the explosion of Teams and Office 365 Groups.

Does the Teams Service Administrator role have the restricted number of Groups that can be created as a standard user can or is this expanded to an unlimited number of Groups that can be created as an Office 365 Global Administrator can?

@Jace Moreno - I have attempted to use the Manage Teams section of the Admin Center (I'm a global admin and have a license for Teams) but I do not see a complete listing of the Teams in our tenant. I tried opening a support ticket with Microsoft, but still no help in figuring this out. Have others experienced this? There is even a Team I am a member of that does not show in Team Management. The Powershell method of grabbing all Teams is still the best option, which is disappointing. I was hoping this new way in the Admin Center would work. It seems only half-baked for now. I agree with @Paul Youngberg that the sorting of Teams in the Admin Center seems odd. There is no way to sort alphabetically and by any real logic. It looks to be sorting by creation date maybe? Please improve upon this so it can be a useful tool for Teams admins. For the moment, it is useless.

@Forrest Hoffman - Thanks, but that shows all the sites connected to Groups, not just Teams. For example, Yammer sites are listed there as are sites connected to Outlook Groups. I want a place to just see Teams-connected sites. That is what that new admin center option is supposed to provide, but it won't show all my MS Teams in my tenant. Microsoft needs to fix that. For now, the only way I know to see a complete listing of MS Teams in your tenant is to use a Powershell command.

Thanks for letting us know about these new roles, but for my organisation they will all be one person.

A suggestion for the Message Center team, it takes time to go through all the notifications that come through the Message center.Microsoft know the number of users in our Tennant. A potential improvement would be to have every item that goes in to the message center be categorised according to the size of tennant it impacts ?e.g. 0 - 50, 50 - 200, 200 - 1000, 1000 - 5000, 5000 - 20,000 etcIn this way those of us who are looking through the message center ever few days can more quickly focus on the items that are directly applicable to us.Perhaps this is more for someone like @Mark Kashman .

Great to see that we can now better interact with teams graph API. I heard they’re could be a graph flow connector on the way, this would do much to speed more uptake of managing teams cia the graph, any ETAs. Also just a bit on the scenarios offfered about, make sure one keeps in mind the channel limits of a Team (200) and ensure that you incorporate both teams and channels into any solution eg a channel per sales lead a single sales site would have issues at 201 channels, or i the flight routes scenario it would be advisable to gather those routes into a series of teams, unless your airline has under 200 routes. Exciting stuff.

@Atef_Elbatalif a user deletes a file, it gets put into the SharePoint recycle bin and it can be recovered from there.

Team Owners have full responsibility and this cannot be decreased.

There are only 2 roles in a Team, Owner and Member.

If you must have more control, then you will can use a classic SharePoint site, that is not group enabled. You can also put read only content into separate sharepoint site and add a Tab with a link to that site

PowerShell, you can script pretty much any aspect of Teams creation. But you have to know how to create and run the scripts.

"Create from" , when you click the "Create team" button you should get two options. "Build a team from scratch" and "Create from".

The Create from option allows you to do something like copy an existing office365 group or team.Using this feature you could copy a TemplateTeam, containing your "Readme", "Common guideline doc" and the folder in the General you mentioned . It would not be very dynamic and you would have to make the documents generic (i.e. not use the name of the team etc).

When you do this it copies the channels, and you can choose if you want the tabs / team settings / apps / members across to the new team you're creating. NOTE it does take a while longer than creating an empty team.BUTThis process doesn't copy content in my experience. To do that you could then use the SharePoint "Copy to" function from your TemplateTeam to the new team.

I have just finished a project where we clone a base template team and this copies and configures all the tabs, adds the owners and members and sets up any number of Teams with the names we give them. This is done with PowerShell, the Graph API and using an Azure App with Permissions to the Graph API. Not a trivial thing to create.

The issue with the out of the box copy of teams is that the tabs do not get set up, you still have to go to each one and add or select the links/document libraries that are needed.

The way we "copied" files to each Team was to have a central SharePoint site that has a central document library which was added in a tab to each team but it would have also been possible to copy a set of documents to the new Channel if needed.